Ten years ago this month, a 27-year-old Louisiana native named Jeff Mangum and his band, Neutral Milk Hotel, released In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, an album that spent the ensuing years turning mixed reviews into a near-uniform chorus of praise. The record mixed influences from early American spirituals and Bulgarian folk, lengthy narratives of paranoia and catharsis, all filtered through the muse that enveloped Mangum during the writing process, Anne Frank. Mangum mined history for the instrumentation and arrangements to match his lyrics measure for measure, then dropped out of the musical spotlight’s reach before it could land on him and afford him the credit he deserved while he still performed.
| Listen to "When The Last Lights Go Out" from Birdlips‘ Cardboard Wings:
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Clifford Usher, the leader of local duo Birdlips (and former singer and guitarist for The Business of Flies), names Neutral Milk Hotel among the small collection of influences on Cardboard Wings, a record rooted in Usher’s time spent in Valencia, Spain. Like Mangum’s opus, Cardboard Wings sounds like the product of a precocious young man that trusted the tidal pull of his gut, severing instruments from their past histories to patch together a motley orchestra that resonates with him.
Usher keeps his cast of musicians small and close: Lindsay Pitts, the last member to join The Business of Flies, remains the only other permanent member of Birdlips (Usher also brings in former Flies member Sean McVey as his studio drummer). Lyrically, Usher stays in a reasonably straight line—the record begins and ends with the singer preparing for travel, with pauses for daydreams and sidetrips—and stays within the songwriter’s own head, but Pitts and the studio musicians uncannily map out Usher’s emotional and lyrical itinerary.
 Everybody flaps your hands! Local duo Birdlips (Lindsay Pitts and Clifford Usher) ruffle more than a few feathers with their magnificent record, Cardboard Wings. |
And the landscape is all liminal—close to sleep or waking, dawn or dusk, crossing borders and bodies, the type of grand events that make countless writers feel small in scale but enormous in perspective. The title track that opens the record almost mirrors the chord progression of the title track from In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, but tosses in the fret jumps of a slide guitar to match Usher’s transatlantic leap. An echo-soaked banjo and Pitts’ electric organ drop notes like coins down a well in the fantastic “When the Last Light Goes Out,” and Usher’s voice doubles and doubles again into a sound that nears “ohm” before he hits the song’s chorus.
| Listen to "Some Kind of Death" from Birdlips‘ Cardboard Wings:
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The banjo makes a return with sitar-styled riffs over fuzzed-out drums in “Some Kind of Death,” but to a different effect; the song falls on “Part Two” of the record, in which Usher makes the switch from internal monologue to detailing a vague relationship. The dominant first-person writing of “Part One” turns plural, as in “Tire Chains,” or into a confession directed at a more specific person, as in the clattering, whistling “Blades of Grass.” By the end of the album, Usher is back inside his own head but with a few lessons learned. “There’s no point in tugging at the reins,” he sings on album closer “Dream Within a Dream.” “The world is strange and beautiful; we are running through its veins.”
Cardboard Wings is a remarkable first record, afforded the care in recording (by Abel Okugawa and Monkeyclaus) and mastering (by New York wiz Alan Douches) that Birdlips deserves for its efforts. My hope for the band is that, unlike Mangum following his Aeroplane, the duo remains sure of their wings.